Well, I feel like a dolt for having waited so long.
I finally got around to using 64Door on my Amiga 2000 a day ago. From what I can tell, the program was written in 1993 and was offered on one of the Fred Fish disks (no idea which one). The version I offered was updated in 2013, although I'm not sure in what way.
In any case, it doesn’t appear that it can be installed to a hard drive. No biggie. But it is actually quite simple to use once you understand the basic commands. To that end, from a terminal standpoint, the program is is so basic it will probably throw a lot of people off kilter if they aren’t used to typing AT commands, because there’s not much this thing offers. Except, that is, for pure PETSCII conversions, which is awesome.
It works like this:
- Move the 64Door ADF to floppy (link to the ADF is below)
- Boot off the floppy. If you know your modem is set to 1200 baud, skip to step 4.
- When 64Door launches, you’ll essentially be looking at a blank screen. It’s important that the terminal be at the same baud rate as your modem. Let’s say your modem is set to 9600 baud. If you start typing, the characters on the screen will look like gibberish because 64Door, the software, defaults to 1200 baud on launch. You have to tap the “Help” key on your Amiga keyboard and set your baud rate using the Function keys to change it to the proper setting. When you type “Help” a second time, you get back to the terminal window.
- Lastly, you use your AT commands if you aren’t using phone book commands stored on your modem and connect to the Commodore BBS of your choice.
Code: Select all
ATDT particlesbbs.dyndns.org:6400
You should know if you’re in 80 columns or not (interestingly 64door defaults to 80) but Particles will ask you to tell it what columns you’re running since it can’t detect it.
If you want to dial Centronian, which is a 40 columns board, you can switch to 40 cols at any time by tapping that handy Help key which, frankly, I’ve never used a single time prior to using this program.
Once you drop the terminal to to 40 cols and connect to Centronian, you’ll see big chunky fonts if your Amiga monitor is bigger than a 1702 (like mine is) and the BBS will fill your screen as it should. Note: the fonts look much slimmer and crisper on an actual 1702 being fed by a C64, but it’s a small price to pay - it really does look fantastic and is so much closer to the real thing than ANSI mode, because it IS the real thing. To that end, Centronian won’t even work unless you connect with a PETSCII capable setup. Trust me, I tried. So this is the way to go for Commodore PETSCII-only boards.
Anyhoo, 64Door looks and feels great. Don’t be jealous, C64!
For your convenience, here again are the downloads for64Door and Color Term - PETSCII terminals for the Amiga.